Name: How Shopify Grew Without Adding to Its Headcount
Uploaded: 2026-03-24T17:25:00Z
Duration: 2 min 14 s
Description: Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister breaks down how a companywide mandate to build with AI drove immediate ROI—allowing the e-commerce giant to grow 30% annually over three years without expanding its workforce.

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Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister breaks down how a companywide mandate to build with AI drove immediate ROI—allowing the e-commerce giant to grow 30% annually over three years without expanding its workforce. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260324/42ee28d6-6ecd-4008-a4c6-ab9a6ac4ce41/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister breaks down how a companywide mandate to build with AI drove immediate ROI—allowing the e-commerce giant to grow 30% annually over three years without expanding its workforce.

How Shopify Grew Without Adding to Its Headcount

And where have you seen at Shopify the biggest changes?

It's pretty much across the board. Like, you'd expect me to say engineering and product development in terms of how much they can build, and that's true. But it's also like, we, just within finance, we have, I had an accounts payable clerk, this was, what, last year about this time, basically build something that was super impressive that almost essentially was a module to add on some of the things that we were doing. And so some of the interesting developments out of the finance team, out of the legal team, out of the HR team.

Alan Murray: Marketing, I would think.

Marketing. So it's a little bit, to me, you see these people who had not been builders. It's one thing to say I'm using AI as a tool. You said, "Well, I could have used Excel", or "I could have used ERP system", there's all the different things that you could have used from a technology tool perspective historically. But this is really allowing people to accomplish things much more holistically than they had before.

So the other question that everybody in this audience wrestles with, and we talk about it a lot in these meetings, is the return on the investment.

Jeff Hoffmeister: Yep.

Where do you see it? How do you see it? How quickly do you see it? If you don't see it, what do you do about it? How quickly, I mean, you were telling everybody to do it. You had to pay the cost for everyone to get involved. How quickly did you see measurable return?

Oh, I think the pace of innovation, again, especially on the product decide, was almost immediate. And so what we have to do certainly in terms of thinking about, because there are costs, right? If you don't monitor it, the costs are gonna get out of control. But we don't want to be in a position where we're saying, "Hey, don't build with AI." We're trying to think about how do you make sure that maybe you and kind of in some of the G&A functions maybe you're not using the most recent, most expensive model. Or maybe in certain situations where you have power users you get them to maybe do a slightly different approach to things. But it's not should we be using it. It's the assumption you should be using it aggressively. And they're just ways on the margin to make sure you handle any excesses of things.

What's the impact been on the size of the workforce?

Well, we've been at a, as we disclosed publicly, we've been relatively flat as a percentage, or sorry, as a total headcount for three years now.

Alan Murray: And growth rate during those three years?

Has been basically 30% plus.

30%. So you've doubled the size of the company with no additional people.

Jeff Hoffmeister: Correct.

That's pretty good.